


Day 20: Hands Hands Hands

by whatsanapocalae



Series: Inktober 2018 [11]
Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: Flashbacks, Possession, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 12:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16367825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsanapocalae/pseuds/whatsanapocalae
Summary: Just after the ending of Outlast, the doctors are trying to save his body while the walrider is trying to save his mind.Whenever I skip a day in Inktober, it's just that I wrote an original piece that day instead of fic. You can read the original ones on whatsanwritepocalae.tumblr.com





	Day 20: Hands Hands Hands

Hands, fingers, too many, digging, digging in, probing the holes in his body, the ones that they made themselves. Pain, it was a haze, something that he could hardly feel, something that he could feel himself rise over and fall under at the same time. They were everywhere and he couldn’t escape and as he tossed his head around he felt something new, something black and sticky, stretching and sliding and clinging to his soul. 

He’d had those hands on him too. He’d been here so long and they’d scraped his mind with their blunt fingernails, injected him with chemicals they said would help and just made everything worse and then there were hands touching him, cradling him, wrapping him in sleep and dreams and long hallways where something was around the corner and he had to get past it but at the end of the hall were their hands and they were waiting for him.   
And there was the man, sitting there, watching it all, watching his pain as he was twisted into something as nightmarish as that hallway. His hands were shaking and weak, the skin dry and brittle. They sat in his lap, moving and never moving, as if there were insects under the skin. 

Those hands were like his father’s hands and, sometimes, when he dreamed, he thought that they were his father’s hands, touching him, holding him, running softly and tenderly between his muscles, tracing the shape of his bones under his tendons, massaging and unfolding the knots in his guts. But this man was not his father. This man was small and frail and had the power of a god over him. 

They reached in and grabbed a bullet and he woke, the pain of the darkness that hid in him shying away from his scream, soothing him, promising vengeance once all this was over. He wanted this to be over. 

He looked over. The doctor’s were wearing gas masks and armor plating. They all had guns at their sides. He wasn’t sure if they were even doctors. 

“Should we put him under?” one of them asked, the voice underwater. 

“No, we need him awake. We went over this.” Another should their head. He didn’t know which one. 

“A pity. Billy was put under.”

“We didn’t know about the complications yet.”

They plugged him up with bloody fingers and gauze and they sewed him up. Their hands didn’t shake. They knew what they were doing. They felt no remorse. 

The darkness came back for him, promising him things, strength and freedom, as long as he was asleep. It told him more about what came before. 

He’d had those hands on him for so long and they kept pinching and prodding, experimenting. They were trying to make something new, something beautiful. He wasn’t beautiful. He had cracked broken nails and they had to tie him down because he wanted nothing more than to tear the flesh from his bones. The darkness was inside of him and its touch was cold and foreign and it burned like sin. He didn’t know that others would gladly burn for it. It had whisper to him too, but in his dreams. 

When they were done. When they were done touching him every day, when they were done forcing things into his veins, when they were done sliding fingertips over his scars as if the cared about him, they locked him away. Those hands that had always been so rough, even when they tried to soothe, dragged him down and down into the hell under the asylum, where the other patients, those they’d touched, those that hadn’t been as strong as he was, those whose dreams were too bland and too inconsequential, to be of use, would continue in their terrible experiments. They’d dragged him under the earth, where the corridors were long and winding and he couldn’t tell if things were real anymore, and they shoved him into this thing. 

It was a ball and his body was too large for it but he was curved and shaped to fit. They shoved a tube down his throat and needles in his arms and he was made to face a large screen. The screen was shapes and darkness and death and the darkness inside of him liked it well enough but liked the idea of making them pay for it even more. 

Another bullet. Another scream. None of them were stopping this. They all had weapons in their hands. They could stop this. They were using those weapons on him, scalpels and needles and hands. They knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly what they were making. They didn’t even need to shoot him. He wasn’t a threat. He could barely move. 

One of them took his hand. He wanted to pull it away but he couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t do anything and they had shot him anyway. They looked at his fingers. That was the good one. That was the one that the shears had cut through cleanly. That was the one that had stopped bleeding first, as the blood had coagulated and he had been so good not to break it open. Now the blood was starting to look black. He didn’t want them touching it. 

They touched, all the same and the bullet was coming out and his back was arching and the darkness was clouding him and telling him that he was doing well and he could feel them scraping inside of those holes and he just wanted it all it end. 

He thought that he would die. He thought that he would be thrown against the walls and shoved through spaces his body would never fit through and that all that would be found of him was a mutilated corpse, some random notes that he’d scrawled, and a camcorder that had recorded it all. He wanted those hands to be pristine, to be gentle, to handle what had happened here with both understanding and care for the victims. He wasn’t the only one. 

He’d thought they were all victims, but that was before he’d made it into the basement, before he’d seen what had happened at that old Nazi’s hands. They were cracked and the skin was breaking and they wouldn’t stop shaking but still he had his hand on everything, his finger in every pie and skull in this place, and he was making something terrible. And that something was in him now and it was promising him relief. 

And he lay himself down, letting the darkness ooze out of that last bullet hole, letting it wrap itself around him like a cocoon, protective and nurturing and turning him into something new. He could no longer feel those hands. He could no longer feel himself. He felt himself, his true self, fading away and dying and he did not grieve because there was no way that he was ever going to go home anyway. 

Miles left and the hands stopped touching him. The Walrider came and its hands touched all of them instead.


End file.
